[Falx]: 648.The City Beneath.Intro

Introduction

Darshez Nagaeron, the City Beneath the Earth, home of a vicious, cruel, and generally malevolent people known as the Kazyreth, was a city that for most people on the surface of the great continent of Arlos existed only in the ravings of madmen and in tales meant to frighten children into doing as their parents told them. Few knew the truth of the matter; that Darshez Nagaeron and its cunning, evil inhabitants were a very real and very deadly force. Thankfully for those who turned a deaf ear to the warnings, the Kazyreth rarely left their underground stronghold, preferring to murder, backstab, and deceive one another instead of worrying over trivial surface matters.

A race of elves, the Kazyreth had, in the ancient times of the Cataclysm, fled to the shelter of the caverns when an ice age had threatened to wipe them from the face of the planet. There, in the warmth and darkness, embraced by the earth, they carved out a civilization from the living rock. The city itself had been hewn to mimic the natural formations of the stone amongst which its noble houses, temples, and shops resided. On casual glance, it might have been overlooked as any other great cavern in a network of great caverns, but closer inspection would reveal paved causeways, fountains, and statuary that indicated the presence of the Kazyreth. It existed in tiers that wound their way around the gaping maw of a chasm that extended several miles into the bowels of the earth and was known as Sharzahd’s Chimney. It ended in a great lake that glowed with a sickly phosphorescence and it extended several miles above the domed ceiling of the first tier of the city, crossed at intervals with stone bridges leading from the city and into the wilder, but no less dangerous networks of caverns that opened to the surface world. Light from the surface filtered down from the Chimney, but barely reached even the first tier. Still, the winds blowing across the top of Sharzahd’s Chimney sometimes brought down to the inhabitants of Darshez Nagaeron the scents of the surface, scents that awoke in some of them a yearning for something more than the existence offered them by the cruel, cold city.

Some would say that Kazyreth hearts were as dark as their skin, and truth lay in the words. The dark skinned elves lived in a society that valued cleverness, resourcefulness, and ruthless tactics in obtaining what they desired, traits that were encouraged by their goddess, Minrou. Greed and malice formed the basis of belief in the city and those with the power to take what they wanted were encouraged to do so within reasonable limitations, without which the city would devolve into chaos in a manner that the dark goddess could no longer use. To this end, Minrou kept a tight reign on the ruling matrons of the city, making sure that those whose ambitions grew too large for her plans were swiftly eliminated from her equations in one way or another. She liked order to her city and worked aggressively to see to it that her order was followed. However, like her worshippers, the goddess showed a propensity toward avarice and granted little mercy to those who stood in the way of her getting exactly what she wanted.

It was from this world of violence and deceit that there would rise a small band of Kazyreth whose hearts and minds the Great Dark Lady Minrou could not blind to the truth, and though at the time, few would understand their destinies, they would shake the very nature of the city and its inhabitants to the core.

-from an account of Kazyreth history given by Imrigo M’lanin